Fermentation

I suspect that I shouldn’t have been surprised when my request for blog topics netted several about my process and career, but I was. The first one I’m going to deal with was about letting projects “ferment” and its implied negative effect on productivity and the writer’s finances.

In order to explain how that works for me, you probably need to know a couple of things. The first one is that I’m inconsistent. Every book’s process is a bit different. For instance, I usually have an outline, which I proceed to ignore, but at least five of my books don’t fit that pattern: Talking to Dragons had no outline and no plan until nearly two-thirds of the way through and neither did Sorcery and Cecilia; the three Star Wars novelizations had what might be termed an extreme outline – I had a 120 page script for each book which I had to follow.

Next, I’m usually a one-project writer. Still, I wrote the first four or five chapters of The Seven Towers alternately with the first four or five of Talking to Dragons – and when I say “alternately,” I mean that I spent one week working on the first book and the next week working on the second, then back to the first. It worked for me then because the process was very different for the two: for Seven Towers, I was still in the making-things-up-and-nailing-them-down stage, which requires frequent pauses to think. Talking to Dragons, on the other hand, was just showing up; it needed pauses, but I couldn’t do anything in the pauses because I didn’t know what was going on.

That back-and-forth rhythm only worked for the first four or five chapters, though; I couldn’t maintain the constant shift in focus beyond that. Also, Talking to Dragons took off, and Seven Towers needed some attention to get unstuck, so I set the second book aside, finished Talking, and then went back and picked up Seven Towers some eight or ten months later. I’ve never been able to keep two book manuscripts going at the same time for more than a couple of chapters. Even when I’ve been hit with a must-write short story idea, it generally means setting the novel aside for a few weeks while I focus on the short piece (fortunately, this only happens about every five years or so).

For about the first twelve years of my career, I finished everything I started, though not necessarily all in one go. There were a couple of time when I started a book, got halfway through, and then had to stop and work on something else because of circumstances or to take advantage of a can’t-pass-it-up opportunity. Mairelon the Magician is an example of that; I got a good chunk of the book written, and then the Letter Game came along and took over my life for three months and turned into a novel. By then I’d realized that I didn’t want to sell Mairelon to my then-current publisher, but they had an option on my next book. So I wrote them something I thought they’d like, which took more time, and in the end it was a couple of years before I got back to Mairelon and finished it.

That sums up my answer to the question about letting my stories settle or ferment: either the story is actively getting worked on and the “fermenting” takes at most a week or two, or else the story has been placed in storage, where I expect it to stay for a year or more before I get back to it. In the former case, the intermediate non-writing weeks are part of my normal writing process, and I’m noodling at the story constantly. In the case of half-done things in storage, there’s a reason they’re there (beyond “Oh, gosh, I’m stuck”) and I immediately start working on something else. It’s part of filling the pipeline.

Writing can be looked at as a series of very long pipelines. People sometimes recognize the last and most obvious: when you sell a book to a publisher, it can take years to work its way through the editorial and production processes. Ideally, one continues writing and selling things, and eventually they start coming out the other end of the process. Other parts of the process work this way, too: when one is trying to get published and/or establish one’s career, for instance. The most successful writers I know wrote their first manuscript, put it in the submissions pipeline, and immediately started writing their next ms. Some of them had four or five books under submission when the first one finally got to the other end of that pipeline and an editor bought it.

For some writers, writing works the same way. I know a number of writers who really can’t focus on more than one story at a time at all. They have a hard time coming up with stories they want to tell, and once they have one, they relax with a sigh and don’t generate any more ideas until they’ve completed the one they’re working on. I, on the other hand, can generate five or six interesting ideas for possible books in a couple of hours, tops. I used to be able to keep this tendency under control, but some time in the 1990s it got loose and now there’s no keeping up with it. Some of the stories need working on before I can see whether they’re interesting enough to finish; some of them stall when they need some heavy-duty research that I don’t have time to do; and there are a few that I started and then realized I didn’t have the chops to do justice to. So those are all partials sitting on my hard drive, and I revisit them occasionally between books to see if any of them are ready to get written the rest of the way yet. If one of them is, I have a big jump on getting the next thing started.

The “fermenting” is only a financial problem if it takes a long time and one cannot produce any other pay copy in the meantime (or can’t produce it fast enough to keep the publishing pipeline filled) and one is in a position where one is depending on that steady income. Otherwise it’s only a problem of patience.